Unknown Publication August 1969

MRS. ALMA RIIPA

Mrs. Alma Hansina Riipa died Tuesday in a Portland area nursing home. She was 87.

She was born May 26, 1882, in Vatso, in the far north of Norway, to which her parents had come on skis to espace famine in Finland. Seven years later, the family sailed for America on a ship which crashed into another in mid-ocean fog.

As a young woman in Astoria, Mrs. Riipa witnessed arrival of the first train from Portland. At the turn of the century, she married Charles Rinnell, member of a pioneer Astoria family who had homestead timber lands in Washington across the Columbia River.

A second marriage, to Adolph Riipa, took Mrs. Riipa on several extended trips to Fairbanks and the Ophir minning country. Since her second husband's death in 1941 Mrs. Riipa had lived in Portland.

She was a Red Cross president during World War I, a member of the YWCA board of directors, a court interpreter and active in many school, church and community activites.

Funeral will be at 11:30 a.m. Thursday at Gable Funeral Home. Burial will be at Greenwood Cemetery, Astoria.

Survivors are a daughter, Mrs. Mildred R. Foster of Portland; son Arthur of Carnation, Wash.; sister, Mrs. Hilda Lewis of Portland; brother John Larson of Huntington Beach, Calif.; four grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.